Journal

Popping the Tires

the suspect sits in the interrogation
room and the only thing they say is
“can I get three orders of chicken
fries and extra sweet and sour sauce”
and I’m pretty sure Robinson’s about
to lose it. It’s been so long none of us
can remember what this kid got hauled
in for in the first place. Every time
the secretary suggests we call to see
if chicken fries have, in fact, returned
to the menu, that vein in Robinson’s
temple gets a little bit more prominent.

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in London Grip, Sage Cigarettes, and Sin Fronteras, among others.

Vehicle

—with Apologies to Rilke

How I marvel at the trash truck
on Mondays that arrives
between the turkeys’ promenade
and the vet who walks her Weimaraner.
I know Rilke would object,
but the truck is like an angel,
arriving with open arms like a father
who lifts and turns his child
upside down overhead in a rush
of terrified glee and then returns him to earth
with balance unstable, the ear’s gyroscope
struggling to lessen the joyous spin.
Who knew this appearance of a trash truck
would conclude with my father,
playful and tossing, me at the window
each Monday wanting to be dizzy once more?

He Was a Whisper

Dawn, slide-quiet of a drawer, dad awake,
a weak incandescence cracking the door to my room,
his bare feet walking their heavy steps, the crackle
of a humble lunch packed in a used bag of brown paper.
He woke in the dark, moved in silence through blackened rooms
by memory and one hand out to drag and search against a wall,
exercised, elongated where none would hear the push of exhalation,
showered in faint light, ate by the clock’s dim hour, buttoned, tied by feel.
When the dog began wagging her tail against the floor
I waited like a smooth stone in the water’s wash
patient to be sparked by a ray picked by his hand poking through pines.
He was a whisper, a secret I could not hear, a haze of sound,
not the thing itself, but the truth known by shadows on the wall.
What I wanted was enough light to see him without his turning away.
Who else knew this part of his life? Not brother, not wife.
How many shallow days did he survive before being brushed into the deep?
I heard his suffering in a sigh, his audible shortcomings, his thwarting,
his discontented breath, the grunts of frustration without pleasure,
then his final whispered goodbye to me a soft penetration of my cavernous room,
a blonde oil that seeped through wood and left a polished radiance,
a hydration of the desiccation of darkness that it might slide off
and soothed friction might generate a combustion of the day.
I dreamed of seals lying on the posts below the wharf
and risen from the water of sleep aware of whiskers and a cold nose
kissing my forehead, and in the morning found his voice
echoing in my ear, me lying on the floor by the cold front door.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed to Heartwood, Tiny Seeds Journal, Vita Poetica, and Willows Wept Review.

Wyoming

The sea opens
before us. I don’t look back.
In this ocean, earth
and brush. Land—

this land. This
land, rolling, slowly
swells, landscape
breaking against our shore. I am

not afraid. Our spirits wait
in ancient robes—we are
coming. Wild
horses swim, black manes

floating. I understand
what it is to be close
and far. We were born
in water—now this. This vast

and arid sea,
unbroken by what it is
no longer. In the distance
dust rises like mist,

like fog, like God.

 

When Magnolias Bloom

-in memory of t.s.

I think of her when magnolias bloom—
the same blossom offering
to sky that filled the grounds

of youth. Fragmented memories
of her hands and pale eyes—her purpled
neck painted cream, flowers

round her casket. The words
we once exchanged, unatoned
in the infinite—

I didn’t know. I didn’t know

that death could come veiled, in the grim
night hands of another—
that time is but one ending.

The half-life haunts—like the bloom
that is cut before it ever fully
opens, ever touches

the warmth of setting sun, ever knows
the tenderness of gently
falling to green earth. I watch

the first magnolia open, purple
and cream blossom offered to sky,
and think how fragile this is—

that I should get to hold my husband’s hand, age
shining through our bodies like sunlight
and watch this—the slow and sacred

bloom of the magnolia.

Natalie Callum is a writer and poet living between St. Louis, Missouri and Wyoming. When she is not writing, she can be found outside free climbing and exploring with her much beloved husband. Her work has been published in Willawaw Journal and Amethyst Review.

 

Between Him and the World

—on the early death of Alex Leavens

Footsteps cross wet stones
in the streambed. Snowmelt
spills through moss and ferns.

I want his photograph and think—
I’ll just ask if I can take his portrait.
Too late I realize the impossibility.

We thought we saw him one night
at the base of the mountain,
following the trace of an elk.

He was reflected in a shiver of moonlight
shifting through clapping leaves.

We spotted him many times, but each time
wind revealed fog in the valley, a flock of birds
scattered by a red-tailed hawk,
the slinking shadow of a fox at daybreak.

We expect him to return,
ruby-crowned kinglets and I,
to read us a new poem.

He will always be the young woodsman
ruddy beside a bonfire, bright sparks rising
in a crackling spiral against black-green forest.

I have new gloves and a new hoe—
I plant eulogies. He was a sure-footed fisher,
a stalking panther, a salmon in the river.
He was a harrier with an adder in his talons
fighting a headwind. He was a canoe, a paddle,
the ripple in the wake.

 

The Haircut

My husband has come home from our oldest son’s house.
I don’t look at him until we are sitting down to lunch.
When I look it is as if he is ten years younger!
His eyebrows are trim. Where are the cobwebs
sprouting from his ears?

He is kempt! His grizzled hair looks almost blond,
smooth, sun kissed, like a surfer dude in a movie
from the seventies. I think Jeff Bridges,
Paul Newman—a straight Montgomery Clift.
His eyes are as blue as Frank Sinatra’s.

I gaze at his forearms and am reminded of Tom Volk
in fifth grade when the teacher had him clutch
the wires from a hand cranked generator
how his muscles bulged and twitched.

This is what sex must be like, I remember thinking.

Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine art, has poems in The Opiate, Timberline Review, Pif, and elsewhere. She is the editor of /pãn| dé | mïk/ 2020: An Anthology of Pandemic Poems from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her first collection The Barbie Diaries was published in 2019 with Just a Lark Books. Callie Comes of Age was published by Cirque Press in 2021. Three collections, Leda, Isadora, and Andromina, A Stranger in America are forthcoming. Her sentient android, Andromina, protagonist of ninety-four poems, declares, “I wax magnetic as chunky biker jewelry, yet am susceptible to innuendo.”